Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (11 page)

For all the ink spilled on media criticism, the fact that the most potent influence on our political press is a right-wing dirtmonger specializing in often false personality smears is all one needs to know about the state of American political discourse.

Willing Puppets

When confronted with this shameful reality, the reaction of our leading journalists is quite telling. In October 2007, there was an intense debate over whether to expand a government health care program for children, known as S-CHIP. In defense of their efforts to expand the program, the Democrats put forward a message from Graeme Frost, a twelve-year-old whose life was likely saved by virtue of having S-CHIP health care coverage after he was in a near-fatal car accident. Almost immediately thereafter, a slew of right-wing bloggers and pundits unleashed a vicious attack on the Frost family, depicting them as wealthy defrauders who deserved no government-supplied insurance, culminating with Fox News’s Michelle Malkin driving to the Frosts’ home, writing about their house, and speaking to their neighbors.

The right-wing bloggers’ attacks on the Frost family proved to be based on multiple falsehoods about the family’s economic status, and those hit pieces generated widespread revulsion. Soon thereafter it was revealed that—contrary to the false denials of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—McConnell’s office had sent to various journalists a memorandum about the Frosts disseminating the false attacks in order to encourage reporters to highlight the smears.

CNN’s John Roberts dutifully went on the air and mindlessly repeated what he read in the McConnell smear memo, provided to him—“off the record,” of course—by McConnell’s top aide. This is how our journalists report on the political issues they cover. From the McConnell memo sent to Roberts:

Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on S-CHIP….
Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?

This claim traveled from the off-the-record Republican dirtmongering machine out of the mouth of CNN’s Roberts, with no stopping for investigation. Hence, Roberts, after quoting from Malkin’s blog, reported:

Some of the accusations [against the Frosts] may be exaggerated or false. But did the Democrats make a tactical error in holding up Graeme as their poster child?

In language taken almost verbatim from the McConnell memo, Roberts’s story then flashed to a “CNN political analyst,” who placed the blame squarely on the Democrats’ shoulders: “I think in this instance what happened was
the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting
as they could have done on this young man, his situation, his family.”

This was but one instance—a highly illustrative one—demonstrating how so much of our press coverage is shaped by petty, personality-based dirt and smears fed by anonymous Republican operatives to gossip-hungry, slothful journalists, who then uncritically repeat it all. About this right wing/press synergy, the widely quoted liberal political blogger Digby wrote:

Journalists will say that using political “oppo research” is a legitimate way to get tips, as long as they always check them out before they run with them. Fair enough. But what they fail to acknowledge is that this allows the best story-planters to set the agenda for coverage, and the best story-planters are those who know how to get the media interested.

And after watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it’s obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind-numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers.

In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simplemindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, “character issues,” which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.

The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby [in response to Ambassador Joe Wilson’s Iraq Op-Ed] used “the wife sent him on a boondoggle” line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.

In the
Washington Post,
media critic Howard Kurtz responded to Digby’s essay. His reply provided great (albeit unintentional) insight into the mind-set of our political press.

Initially, Kurtz—who is married to GOP media consultant Sherri Annis—simply could not tolerate the notion that the press corps’ dirtmongering favors Republicans. One of the Central Principles of Beltway journalists is “equivalence”—always to insist that everything is the same between the two sides, regardless of whether it actually is. To demonstrate this claim of media balance, Kurtz refuted Digby’s description of how our political press functions:

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

Leave aside the fact that Kurtz is so desperate to defend Republican operatives that he just recklessly asserts things as fact here even though he has no idea whether they are true. Kurtz has absolutely no knowledge of who leaked the NSA surveillance story to the
New York Times
’s Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and cannot know whether the leakers are Democrats. The same is almost certainly true of the
Washington Post
’s Dana Priest’s sources for her CIA “black site” story, whom Priest described as “U.S. and foreign officials” and “current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents”—she did not identify them as “Democrats.”

Worse, the Abu Ghraib whistle-blower was U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Darby, not a Democratic Party operative. And the Bush DUI story was uncovered by a local reporter in Maine through actual, old-fashioned investigative journalism—pursuing a copy of the arrest record and interviewing the arresting officer. But Kurtz, like most Beltway journalists, has such a compulsion to assert equivalencies that he literally just invented facts—Democrats leaked these stories—in order to support his balance mantra.

But far more significant than Kurtz’s willingness to invent facts is that he sees no distinction between (a) revelations that the Bush administration is torturing detainees, holding them in secret prisons, and spying on Americans in violation of the law and (b) what Digby described as “stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage.”

The whole point here is that Republicans dominate political press coverage because they feed vapid, slothful, tiny-minded “journalists” with vapid, tiny-minded, malicious gossip that reporters eat up and spew out in lieu of reporting on actual matters of substance. To rebut this claim, Kurtz argued that Democrats do it, too—and then cited the leaks about
torture, secret prisons, and warrantless surveillance
as his proof.

The most extraordinary political fact over the last seven years is that the Bush administration has been free to pursue such blatantly radical and extremist policies as indefinite detention, torture, and illegal surveillance with barely a peep of protest. The nation remains in a war in Iraq that the vast majority of the country opposes and the Bush administration long threatened new wars against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American citizenry. The alarming issue is not merely that the Republicans have succeeded in foisting upon this country such grossly destructive policies, ones that contravene every core political principle that has defined the United States for decades. It is that they have foisted them with so little critical analysis from our political and media elite.

But it is easy to see why this is so. These policies have become normalized, entirely mainstream, because our elite media does not see anything noteworthy or significant about them, let alone alarming or radical, and—with rare exceptions—they have no desire, and no ability, to take any of these stories on. They are interested in doing nothing other than repeating what they are told by their government sources, and hence that is what they do.

Rendition, warrantless eavesdropping, and expansive executive lawbreaking are just dreary, boring stories to pick at for political fodder when our media stars are forced—between gossipy sessions over Hillary’s coldness and Edwards’s gayness and the size of his house and the content of newspaper advertisements from MoveOn.org—to pay them any attention at all. The last thing they are interested in doing is alienating their secret, inside sources who feed them the prepackaged dirt by trying to expose any actual corruption or wrongdoing in our government. There is a cost to undertaking the latter; it takes work and energy. And our coddled media stars have no interest in endeavors entailing any of that.

That is why Kurtz and his colleagues view torture and NSA lawbreaking stories as the equivalent of what Digby calls “those delightfully bitchy tidbits” fed to them by right-wing dirtmongers. It is because most journalists treat them the same, except that they’re far more interested in the latter than the former. Matt Drudge rules their world.

One of Kurtz’s
Washington Post
colleagues, political reporter Shailagh Murray, is a blazing example of the media’s preference for spoon-fed filth over substantive issues. Murray embodies every decadent, petty, and rotted attribute of the Beltway journalist, enabling one to understand vividly how corrosive our political discourse is simply by observing her behavior.

When Lewis Libby, the top aide to Dick Cheney and one of President Bush’s top advisors, was convicted of multiple felonies in a federal court and sentenced (by a Bush-appointed federal judge) to almost three years in prison, George Bush intervened in the case and announced that he would commute Libby’s sentence to ensure that he never spent a day in jail. When asked during a
Washington Post
online chat about this extraordinary event, Murray—the national political reporter of the
Washington Post—
could barely contain her boredom. She strutted around in a posture of faux sophistication, declaring that she regarded the whole affair as merely “the Libby flap,” and that her reaction could be summed up in one word: “YAAWWN” [
sic
]
.

That is the hallmark of most of the media elite’s reaction to any issues that actually matter—“YAAWWN.” And our political dialogue is thus awash in petty, adolescent gossip and smears that require little work—and even less thought—to churn out. Indeed, in November 2007, the media was obsessed for almost a full week with the story that one of the questioners at a Hillary Clinton campaign event had been “planted”—that is, told what to ask the candidate by a Clinton staffer. Murray unsurprisingly found this irrelevancy full of meaning:

But some stories stay alive longer than others because they reveal a more serious vulnerability. In Iowa, planting questions calls into question your authenticity—something Clinton struggles to demonstrate on the best of days, because she’s just not a gal who wings it.
This episode sort of reminds me of the John Kerry windsurfing photo. It’s the sort of thing that can linger in the mind.

As always, petty personality stories fascinate our political reporters. John Kerry windsurfs! Hillary Clinton is controlling! Substantive matters—such as the President’s decision to protect one of his highest aides from prison—bores them to tears.

In October 2007, one of the first significant events in the presidential race that was a dispute over an actual substantive issue occurred. Throughout 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding that Congress grant retroactive immunity—or amnesty—to telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon that had repeatedly broken the law since 2001 by allowing the administration to spy on Americans without the warrants required by numerous federal laws. Amnesty would mean that the telecoms—which had been losing a series of battles in federal court—could never be held accountable by any court of law.

The telecom industry has given well over $100 million in campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties. Many, many magnitudes greater are their expenditures on lobbyists, former government officials who sell their influence to corporations to secure favorable legislation. And in 2007, the telecoms and their executives suddenly began making huge contributions to Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who—as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—was the key legislator for passing their eagerly sought amnesty bill.

In October, Senator Rockefeller announced that, pursuant to a deal he had reached with Vice President Cheney, he would support legislation granting full retroactive immunity to the telecoms, relieving them of all liability for their blatant lawbreaking. His committee quickly voted on a bipartisan basis, 13–2, to bestow on the telecom industry this extraordinary special protection—protection that literally exempts these companies from the rule of law.

The travesty of telecom amnesty united a broad array of civil liberties and privacy groups, grassroots activist organizations, and bloggers, enclaves that in the aggregate represent millions of politically engaged American citizens. These groups and their members and readers began calling for someone in Congress—anyone—to take a principled stand against this outrage, to take meaningful action to prevent singling out an influential industry and bestowing on it license to break the law.